This week, we've seen the first results from Yureka's work on Spectrum's new networking stack posted to the mailing list[1]. The draft submission modifies the networking VM to forward packets using XDP between physical interfaces attached to the VM and a virtual interface that will be provided by the host system. She has also been working on getting the required dependencies into Nixpkgs: updating[2] libbpf to a version that includes her recently accepted bugfix[3], and fixing a musl build issue[4][5]. [1]: https://spectrum-os.org/lists/archives/spectrum-devel/20250823222134.1772413... [2]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/435918 [3]: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/bpf/bpf-next.git/commit/?id=... [4]: https://github.com/libbpf/libbpf/pull/919 [5]: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/pull/436237#discussion_r2296245797 Demi has been experimenting with using the systemd service manager on the Spectrum host system. The main motivation was systemd's service hardening capabilities. I think we will probably stick with s6 for now, having discovered that we can likely get a similar level of hardening with standalone sandboxing tools, and just creating users for VM services at VM import time, but I wouldn't be surprised if we revisit systemd again in future, and am open to the switch at some point in future if it will be of benefit to Spectrum. I also understand that her work has resulted in a number of service manager-independent improvements to Spectrum that we should see posted soon. As for me, it's been recovering from the second (final) round of dental surgery, the usual Nixpkgs and server maintenance, and most of all getting the new grant all finalized, which I'm hoping is now basically done. I'm looking forward to actually getting back to proper work soon. :)